I recently presented a virtual training on coaching skills for managers. One of the activities focused on listening. For two minutes, the manager just had to listen to their partner and then repeat back what they heard. Sounds easy, right?
Well, there is one comment I hear every time I do this activity. Can you guess what it is?
“It was so nice to be able to talk and just be heard.”
Of all the accolades I’ve earned in my life, I’m particularly proud of an award I received last month.
Along with my daughters, we were named “Foster Family of the Month” from Fetch Wisconsin Rescue.
The girls have been asking me forever to get another pet. So in the middle of quarantine, when they were homeschooling and missing their friends and activities, they asked me again if we could get a dog. After watching our poor 14-year old cat tolerate them dressing her up in homemade face masks, because “they were sooooo bored!”, I finally agreed.
With a caveat. That we get a foster dog.
A few weeks later, Sirius arrived. As in Sirius Black. He’s a one-and-a-half year old, Great Dane/labrador mix. Overnight, the girls became responsible for a 90-pound dog that was experiencing severe separation anxiety and had significant behavior issues.
But he was also incredibly sweet, and we all fell in love with him immediately!
Suffice it to say, the work we did in between me agreeing to get a dog, and the day that Sirius arrived at our house, is what led to being Foster Family of the Month. Does that maybe surprise you to hear that the recognition was earned because of what we did before he even arrived? Read on.
When looking to the year ahead, I definitely like to set some specific goals, but I also choose a one-word intention for the year. As you might have guessed from all of our December posts about clearing out, my word for 2020 is minimalism.
I have identified ways that I want to achieve this in all areas of my life, hopefully leading to a more streamlined business, a cleaner house, and a regular meditation practice.
So how did I come up with this? Well, I asked myself some tough questions about 2020. I combine that with what I learned about myself in 2019 and voila! An intention emerges. [Read more…]
As many of you know, in the spring of 2016 my life was flipped upside down. My husband was arrested, and overnight I was a single parent of two young daughters.
Before John’s arrest, I was free to work as much as I wanted, knowing that he had things covered on the homefront. And I worked a lot. I mean, a lot.
I got used to working long days in Senator Kohl’s office, and when I decided to launch my own business I felt like I needed to work even harder. I wanted to establish myself in the entrepreneur space and felt the fear of leaving behind a steady paycheck and great benefits. [Read more…]
I am being very honest when I say that I was blindsided by my husband’s arrest in 2016. However, I also have to admit that we had a long and complicated history, and so there were things I knew about him that made the events of that spring more likely. [Read more…]
